Are School Vouchers the Solution to New Britain’s School Budget Woes?

FRANKSMITHSAYSNB EDITORIAL:

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Washington DC had one of the nation’s most successful school voucher programs. 1,700 students, 99% of them black or Hispanic, were able to take advantage of the program which provided them with vouchers to attend private schools such as the very same school that the Obama children attend--that is until the Obama administration killed the program. This is just one more example of the Democrats holding their thumb over minorities to keep them down and preventing them from succeeding, and all for an allegiance to the unholy money they receive from union coffers.

Could the program work here? Let’s look at 2 more success stories:

NEW YORK CITY:

The New York Experiment

The New York City results show solid success in a voucher experiment that involved 1,300 lower-income students, principally minorities, in the fourth and fifth grade, chosen by lottery. Harvard’s Paul Peterson is co-author of the recently published An Evaluation of the New York City School Choice Scholarships Program: The First Year. He reports that students in the program gained 4 percentile points in reading and 6 percentile points in math, compared with a control group of students who had applied for, but did not win, a spot in the program.

Moreover, the schools have smaller class sizes, are more integrated, and have less disruption, less fighting, less cheating, less tardiness, and less racial conflict. There is more communication with parents. Students do more homework. Mr. Peterson, like Mr. Norquist, is a Democrat! (American Enterprise Institute For Public Policy Research: “Score One for School Vouchers”)

MILWAUKEE:

Milwaukee and Its Mayor

No one senses the political situation better than John Norquist, the hard-driving mayor of Milwaukee. The city is Ground Zero of the voucher movement, starting with 1,500 publicly funded private school scholarships made available for low-income inner-city children in 1991. Milwaukee now has about 7,000 students on vouchers, with more than 10,000 expected next year, and 15,000 slots authorized.

Mr. Norquist, who has a sense of humor, thinks that elementary and high school vouchers are a valid and valuable program, just as the G.I. Bill is for college education: "Under the G.I. Bill right now . . . you could go to any public, private, or parochial school you want. You could go to Yeshiva University and become a rabbi. You could go to a theological seminary and become a Catholic priest. Or you could go to the University of Wisconsin and become a communist."

Several points about the outspoken Norquist are of political relevance:
(1) although vouchers have become a talisman for Republicans, he is a Democrat; (2) he’d like to be governor of Wisconsin one day; and (3) he has received 65 percent and 60 percent of the vote in a heavily Democratic city in his last two runs for mayor.

Mr. Norquist believes that other Democrats ought to get with the program, even though usually friendly teachers unions and the liberal People for the American Way vigorously oppose the idea. He gets particularly vehement with one argument coming from antivoucher forces, who claim that vouchers will "cream" the best students to private schools, leaving the inner-city public schools in worse shape than they are now. Mr. Norquist replies: "The creaming has already occurred under the public school choice system that we’ve had in America for the last 35 to 40 years. . . . If you have money and kids and you’re white, you leave town. And that’s school choice that you never hear the defenders of the public school monopoly bring up. Creaming? Anyone care about creaming? No. Because they’re still in a government-run school." (the bold type was added to draw your attention to this paragragh) (American Enterprise Institute For Public Policy Research: “Score One for School Vouchers”)

Back to New Britain.

Instead of spending our tax money producing sales videos to lure the parents into keeping their children in our under-performing schools, perhaps the money the school board is spending on such failed efforts would be put to better use making vouchers available to children and allowing their parents freedom of choice over what schools their children attend. Through this sales video effort, it appears that the Superintendent of Schools is spending our money to protect the union interests when she is being paid with our tax dollars to represent the children and their parents who are paying her salary. This is simply wrong. Isn’t it about time our elected officials started putting the best interests of the children and the taxpayers who are footing the bills ahead of the demands of the unions that they seem to care so much about? At least that is how the Democratic Mayor of Milwaukee seemed to feel.